I Played II, and Errors

Yesterday’s practice session went much better than Sunday’s. If you’re following my little saga, I’m fresh off of a bike crash, well, ten days ago, and I’m trying to get back into the groove of the things that keep me going – playing and physical exercise – while not doing any further damage to myself. Yesterday morning I got a bit of exercise in by walking. I must admit that as a runner, walking, no matter how far or fast, just doesn’t really feel like much to me as a rule! I understand that many people – walkers – say that the benefits are just as good as running. I have some lack of agreement with that when it comes to setting baseline metabolism, but I definitely know that walking is great for you. Keep it up fellow humans!

Happily, my morning walking did not negatively impact my ability to play for a little over an hour yesterday when I returned home.

One interesting thing that’s happening in my playing recently is I’m making novel mistakes that are only possible as I get better at playing. In first position, the fourth finger is the same note as the adjacent higher string, so in playing the violin we end up with a lot of choices about where to play notes. I have started to notice that I’m occasionally free-varying which I choose. At my beginner level, the music almost always dictates whether to use an open string or the fourth finger, and it generally has to do with what comes next or what immediately preceded the note. But as I’m getting familiar enough with hearing the notes and playing them, sometimes I play it in the wrong spot almost instinctively and just keep on going.

In linguistics we say there are smart errors – kids make them as they learn how to apply rules of grammar, they overgeneralize rules and use them for words that have special rules. (I thinked about it for a while vs. I thought about it for a while.). Looks like the same learning curve might obtain for the violin.